Think about the people you manage – do you trust them to deliver? Chances are you know you can rely on most of them, but then there’s one who always misses their deadlines, or needs constant pushing…
For those who don’t deliver so reliably, there are four possible reasons why they’re not performing:
1) They’re not committed to meeting your expectations.
2) They don’t know what your expectations are.
3) They don’t have the skills to deliver.
4) They’re not motivated.
While it may seem like number one is always the cause, it may be one of the other reasons, and you can control these by exercising your communication skills.
So increasing your trust in them is as much about what you can do as what they can do.
However, you can use decreasing trust as a trigger to check your management approach. When you feel your trust in a colleague’s ability to deliver starting to fall:
1) Discuss their understanding of your expectations and make sure you’re both working towards the same goal.
2) Ascertain whether they have the ability to deliver to these expectations – if not, get them skilled up or assign the task to a colleague who does have the appropriate skills.
3) Discuss their motivations for the task and negotiate if necessary/appropriate.
4) Ask them to commit to the task.
You’ll create an environment where everyone is clear on what needs to be done, confident they can do it and motivated to do it. This is good for your projects, great for your workload and excellent for team morale.
What could YOU do with your life if you had just a few more hours each day?
Mike, good points on trust and how to build it. Other possible reasons why a team member might not be performing is that the person has too much work to do or their functional manager re-prioritized their workload. The team member could be committed, motivated, trained, and understand the expectations but just not have the time to get to your project tasks. Communication is still the answer, but now the PM has to work it out with the team member’s manager.
I’ll be posting a related article on team member motivation over the weekend. Key points:
- Personal relationships are the most effective way to motivate people
- Understand why your team members work the way they do
- Rely on their professional integrity
- Team communication is the bedrock of project management
- Teams work best when everyone has goals that are being met
Hi Brian, thanks for your comment.
Excellent point about overload as a possible reason too. I’ll keep an eye out for your article.
Mike
What if a manager (or management of a company) assumes that human beings are untrustworthy? I’ve been writing on this…as to what it tells about their attitude toward their customers. I suspect that such managers would still try to create a culture of trust, if only as a sort of window-dressing (i.e., marketing and human resource management tool). Nice blog!
Hi Free Spirit,
I think that’s a really interesting question.
My idea in this post is that your feeling of trust is an indicator that there’s some other reason things aren’t working. And, because it’s an just indicator you can decide how you will react to identify the root cause and try to fix it.
A culture of trust adds a new dimension to the idea. If a manager decides that humans are untrustworthy, then it says more about that manager than anyone else. It will manifest in how they manage their staff (e.g. micromanage) and how they fail to let their people take initiative. A culture of distrust comes from a number of influential people in a culture (e.g. management) behaving like they don’t trust each other or their staff.
You can’t fake a culture of trust if you don’t trust people.
Conversely, if they decide to really engage in the behaviours that are required for a culture of trust, then that’s what they’ll get. But it must start with each individual deciding to trust.
You can’t change others – you can only change yourself.
All the best,
Mike